I declined with as much grace and courtesy as I could command and thought nothing more about it. Imagine my surprise to find almost immediately that my reply had been construed by its recipients into a sort of expression of personal interest in and sympathy for the people of their country in general. I was proclaimed the warm friend of the young State and an enemy to all her enemies. The incident became the subject of an exchange of diplomatic notes in Washington, and it took a bit of the suavity of the State Department to extricate me from the tangle in which my alleged active participation in the trouble in the Balkans had placed me. It taught me a lesson.